Packaging

The Card

With the Radeon RX 9070 Series, ASRock is introducing a new design theme for the Taichi. It uses various shades of gray on the front and the gears design on the back that we've seen on some motherboards. The metal backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1461 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 60 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1a and a HDMI 2.1b.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


ASRock has installed an RGB lighting zone behind the middle fan and near the Taichi logo on the top edge.


The card uses the 16-pin 12V-2x6 power connector that we've seen on many recent NVIDIA GPUs. It is specified for a power draw of up to 600 W, but the actual power limit of ASRock's card is much lower.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default performance BIOS and a second "quiet" BIOS.

Teardown

The ASRock cooling solution uses eight heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.